- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Makes sense. AAVE is mostly a spoken thing, LLMs are mostly trained on the corpus of written text on the internet and in books. It’s pretty rare for people to write in an AAVE style in those contexts.
Except it has no difficulty reading and understanding AAVE, because people use it online frequently…
Like, the article makes that abundantly clear, but everyone commenting just read the headline and assumed what it meant was it couldn’t understand it…
I never said it can’t understand it. I am agreeing with the notion that it has a bias against using it.
You said it’s rarely used online, which just isn’t true.
But like even this:
I am agreeing with the notion that it has a bias against using it
I’m not sure if you understand the bias is against users who use AAVE, or if you’re saying a LLM doesn’t want to use AAVE.
Maybe you did understand everything, and you’re just being vague.
But almost everything you said could be interpreted multiple ways.
Well, if the training data is largely standard english, AAVE could look like less educated English, because it doesn’t follow the normal rules and conventions. And there’s probably a higher correlation between AAVE use and lower means and/or education because people from the black community who have higher means and/or education probably use standard English more often because that’s how they’re trained.
So I don’t think this is evidence about the model being “racist” or anything of that nature, it’s just the model doing model things. If you type in AAVE, chances are higher that you fit the given demographic, because that’s likely what the training data shows.
So, I guess don’t really see the issue here? This just sounds like people thinking the model does more than it does. The model merely matches input text to data in the model. That’s it. There’s no “understanding” here, it’s just matching inputs to outputs.
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Since they’re vernacular you’ll mostly hear them being spoken, they aren’t really written
AAVE is commonly “written” now because most writing is texts and social media comments. So even if they luck out and learn “proper” English, people still going to type on their phones the same way they talk.
Even for white kids, most of Gen Z slang is just taken from AAVE, when older people complaining about not being able to read zoomer slang from text or comments, it’s just heavily influenced by AAVE.
There’s been bleed over for centuries, but with the Internet and social media it’s merging faster, which is common for dialects of people that interact frequently
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That “V” is for vernacular, it excludes written English by definition.
Yeah. But most people “write” online like they speak…
https://commonwealthtimes.org/2021/02/18/aave-is-not-your-internet-slang-it-is-black-culture/
If people followed rules about language, yeah, vernacular would just be spoken speech. But that’s not how it works. The rules are made to reflect what people are doing. The rules don’t control what people do.
So yes, while the word vernacular commonly meant only spoken words, there ain’t nothing stopping nobody from typing like they speak.
And people been doing it for a long time
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at most you can consciously approximate them into writing, but they won’t be there.
…
A lot of the difficulty older white people have with it, is it’s spelled phonetically to maintain those things.
I gave you a link, lots of people have talked about this, it’s not just some idea I came up with.
You’re still talking like language has to follow the rules.
That’s backwards. The rules change to follow the language
Ain’t you old enough to have heard “ain’t ain’t a word because it ain’t in the dictionary”?
Well, now it is.
And now the dictionary lists “figuratively” as one of the definitions for “literally”.
Insist on following rules, and the dictionary wouldn’t update.
I don’t know how to put it anymore plainly, I’m sorry if you still don’t understand
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We should cancel this LLM guy
For anyone that, like me, was confused what the hell is this language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_English
Seems to be proper name for the kind of language a stereotypical black character in a movie would use.
Can’t say about real world, since I don’t live in the USA.I’d say this is exactly where the LLMs problems with it comes from. For most of us outside of the US and even a lot of people there, it’s exactly that - a caricature of a lower class black person. However for many people it’s a legit dialect of English they speak every day.
I don’t live in America either, but I went on a cruise once and there were many Americans, including a black American couple who were very obviously urban. By which I mean, the wife wore high heels and a tight jeweled mini-skirt on a sea-kayaking excursion…clearly signalling that she hadn’t spent much time outside of a city.
Anyway, I was shocked when they spoke exactly like The Jeffersons, with all the exaggerated whooping, non-stop vernacular, and stage-like mannerisms. It was so over-the-top that I honestly thought they were play acting, but after chatting with them for a while I realized that was just how they were. They were very nice people and clearly having a great time.
I was wondering where the V went…
Apparently African American Vernacular English (said AAVE, pronouncing each letter) is just a dialect and there’s a couple other that fit under just AAE? I never knew about any of those beside AAVE.
Seems to be proper name for the kind of language a stereotypical black character in a movie would use. Can’t say about real world, since I don’t live in the USA.
AAVE is the “relaxed” English you’re talking about. And with the interconnectedness of the Internet, AAVE is kind of displacing the rest.
But honestly from an etymological standpoint I think it makes sense to view AAVE as the base and then just having other flavors of it. From that link they’re trying to break it down I to multiple distinct groups.
They can’t possibly encounter much of it in training material… Of course they’re not going to like it.
What?
It trains off social media, and even white kids use AAVE online. And kids make the most social media comments.
A lot of times when someone posts a text screenshot and everyone talks about how kids talk crazy, it’s just a patois of AAEV mixed in with “regular” English.
It should be able to “read” it fine.
The bias part (as clearly stated in the article…) is when you ask a LLM to describe the person who would phrase something in AAVE, and the LLM replies back with stereotypes about Black people.
So it can read and interpret it fine, it just has a bias against people who talk like that
LLM’s don’t have a bias against anyone, it’s literally just data. And those models are by and large fed with traditionally grammatically correct data. They don’t understand dialects, you’re looking soooooo hard for something to be offended over
If you’re going to revive a 3+ day old thread…
At least read the article first so you have a clue what other people were talking about
African Americans have a weak bias against writing in African American English -> Colleges have weak bias against accepting African Americans as graduate students -> Academic text have strong bias for text written by graduate students -> LLM training data has bias for academic texts -> LLMs have a strong bias for writing like training data.
The error occurs upstream a bit, don’t point at the coders.
So for those that didn’t read the article, it basically explains how LLMs have a negative connotation about AAE. When asked to associate words with AAE written phrases, it used words like “aggressive”. When given a normal English phrase and the same phrase but in AAE and then asked what jobs would suit this person, the LLM gave low income jobs for the AAE statement with broader options for the normal English one.
It’s a serious problem because people that naturally write in AAE are most likely getting worse results. It stems mostly from old rascist newspaper articles and similar things.
It’s a serious problem because people that naturally write in AAE are most likely getting worse results
Person using LLM built on grammatical rules of the English language has subpar results when operating outside of those rules. More at 6.
Because there is no such thing as “African American English”. There is proper English and then there is slang.
Color or colour? Truck or lorry? Cookie or biscuit?Which one is “proper”?
Colour, lorry, biscuit…NEEEEXT
Lmao get out you weird bigot
Slang is slang. It’s always used verbally. I am not sure why someone would expect a llm to generate proper slang. Not sure at all how stating that fact makes one a “bigot”.
